alt Hacker NewsDoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission.
What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation? Note that directly asking Palantir to prefer Google or OpenAI over Anthropic is a violation of procurement law and highly illegal.
What other mechanism do they have?
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I think the whole entire point of this is they shouldn't be excluding Anthropic as an entity, they should be excluding all suppliers on equal terms on the basis of whether they satisfy requirements or not. If it is a requirement that they be able to conduct mass domestic surveillance then they should put that into their contract with Palantir, not "You can't use Anthropic".
So I agree with you, it ought to be illegal for them to tell a supplier what other suppliers to use. But that is exactly the larger point here in the first place that they should not be doing that at all.
Why are they entitled to have a mechanism to force a private company to deal in weapons and surveillance?
> DoD would like to use Palantir. DoD also believes Anthropic is pursuing posttraining in future models that will limit the effectiveness of Palantir tooling, if used by Palantir, for the purposes of DoDs mission.
> What other legal mechanism do they have to prevent Palantir from specifically not subcontracting out to Anthropic, other than a supply chain risk designation?
Even assuming the stated concern was justifiable, and even assuming that there was no alternative mechanism, that does not:
(1) Justify them failing to what is explicit required for the supply chain risk designation,
(2) Create an exception to the 5th Amendment Due Process Clause, which (for reasons stated in the ruling) merely meeting the facial standards in the statute for the supply chain risk designation does not do when the supplier is (contrary to the motivating justification for the statutory provision) a domestic supplier where the government has no special evidence that it can demonstrate for exigency,
(3) Justify the other challenged actions covered by the injunction (like the Hegseth Directive ordering a much broader ban than is imposed by the supply chain risk designation, or the earlier Presidential Directive ordering an even broader ban than the Hegseth Directive.)
(4) Really, do anything at all legally, because it is not a principal of US law that the government, if it has a good motive, is free to act outside of the law merely because there is no provision inside the law which meets its desires.
They can say "sorry Palantir, we will only sign a contract with you if you commit not to use Claude to provide services" and then Palantir is free to decide if they want to accept the terms of the contract or not. This is how business works.